GOP Rep: 'We Don't Control the Southern Border,' Cartels Do

In an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom” on Monday, Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) said that the southern border is controlled by Mexican criminal organizations and not the United States. 

Bridenstine stated “we don’t control the southern border of the United States the way the law requires right now but the transnational criminal organizations in northern Mexico, they control the southern border on the south side of the border. If you pay them enough money you get into our country,” and that many illegals “remain illegal residents in perpetuity.”  

He added that the failure to secure the border endangers children by putting them in the hands of dangerous criminal organizations. 

“There are a lot of children there that have suffered on the trek to the United States of America. we’re talking about cases where people were abused…when you pay criminal organizations to transport children, you’re putting your children in harm’s way,” he said. “If you don’t pay [criminal organizations] enough money your children could be subject to forced labor, forced prostitution, sold in the slave trade, and in many cases many cases death. There are mass graves in northern Mexico because somebody didn’t pay the right criminal organization.”

He also stated that many of the children released to people in the United States are released to non-citizens who cannot be easily subjected to background checks, saying “what I found out was a lot of [children] are being released to folks in the United States of America who are not legal citizens of our country. As such, it is very difficult to do a criminal background check, if not impossible.”

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